What is Life-Ennobling Design?
Life-Ennobling Design started as a conversation between an economist curious about design, and a designer curious about the economy. At the centre of our conversations is a deep frustration about the worldview driving our professions, but also a love for their potential, if used for generative purposes. We became curious about the overlaps but also about the lack of meaningful interactions. Life-Ennobling Design dances at the intersection of Life-Ennobling Economics and Conversational Design. Drawing on the multidisciplinary expertise of Dm’s Next Economics Lab and Conversational Design Studio, we will explore how designers and non-designers can collaborate to reconfigure societal systems.
What is Life-Ennobling Economics?
Life-Ennobling Economics is a bold vision and a call to action. It is an ennobling invitation to break free from ideological constraints, to curiously explore diverse perspectives, and to challenge the foundational building blocks of our extractive socio-economic systems. Implicit in the underlying philosophy is an understanding that the structure and values of the economy must be in service to all forms of life, providing an inclusive scaffold of care and respect.
What is Conversational Design?
To evolve from an economy of extraction to an economy of care we need to evolve from Communication Design to Conversation Design. While Communication Design builds one-directional relationships between corporations and consumers, Conversational Design builds frameworks and pathways for communities.
Our Strategy: We do not believe that meaningful change will come from any single profession. We are all complicit in the systems we are embedded in and we all have our biases and blindspots. At the same time this doesn’t make us powerless. The systems we live and work in are malleable and if we can adjust the building blocks that underpin them, we can also shift how we interact. One problem that we see over and over again, is that it’s very difficult to visualise or start to understand what is driving society. We think designers are uniquely positioned to help non-designers look at things differently. We also think people working in different fields have the deep experience and expertise to understand how they could be reconfigured. LED seeks to foster interdisciplinary conversations that lead to new practices. To flip the frame and position non-designers as the re-designers of their own professions. To bring meaning, purpose and beauty back to the forefront of design. Our working theory is that design is neither the problem nor the solution, but can reestablish itself as the societal connective tissue of a more humane, ennobled world.
Who we are
Martin Lorenz, PhD is the Conversational Design Lead at Dark Matter Labs. He holds a B.A. in Graphic and Typographic Design from the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK) in The Hague, Netherlands and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Design Research from the University of Barcelona, Spain. He is the co-founder of TwoPoints.Net, FlexibleVisualSystems.info and Coding Systems. Martin has taught Design since 2003 at over a dozen design schools around the world. His book Flexible Visual Systems has been published in English (5th edition), Spanish (2nd edition) and Japanese (1st edition).
Emily Harris, FCA is a Chartered Accountant and a Fellow of the ICAEW. She also holds an MA in Regenerative Economics (Distinction) from Schumacher College and a BSc in Medical Sciences from Imperial College. Completing her training with Deloitte in London, she was a manager in their Big Ticket Restructuring Team during the 2008 global financial crisis, before moving on to hold international CFO positions. Emily currently leads the Next Economics Lab and stewards the overall finance and economic innovation work for Dark Matter Labs.